I just received my card in the mail. It’s official. I am now old. Bona fide, as Ulysses Everett McGill would say. In another year, I will receive a second card further confirming the inevitable. I am at peace with this other than that, relative to my earned benefits, it feels like I have been … [read more]
Narrative
A Really Big Lunch
Jim Harrison has been one of my lighthouses of artistic honesty for years. He exposes himself and those around him in bare naked prose and poetry. It’s a guilty pleasure to read someone else’s guilty pleasures. Jim’s primary stock in trade has been poems, short stories, novellas and novels, though, as a food writer he … [read more]
Opening Day, 2017
Happy Opening Day! Ahh, baseball. Maddening to the uninitiated, like watching Bergman’s Seventh Seal. To the cognoscenti, a beautifully out-of-square cipher, as Carlin told us, with an arrhythmic cadence, arcane rules, ancient grudges and secret histories. I don’t care what a linebacker’s glove smells like, but a catcher’s mitt? Yes. Which toxic tube snack is … [read more]
Refuge Of The Roads
Refuge Of The Roads “In a highway service station Over the month of June Was a photograph of the earth Taken coming back from the moon And you couldn’t see a city On that marbled bowling ball Or a forest or a highway Or me here least of all You couldn’t see these cold water … [read more]
Mile Marker Zero
Mile Marker Zero Geoff O’Keeffe New Year’s Eve, 2014 The Sixties finally and ingloriously came to its last rest today here in Key West, Florida, southernmost outpost of The Conch Republic. And, quite possibly, in a dozen other iconic locales featured so squarely in the bygone legends of inspiration, illumination, excess, piracy and idealism, such … [read more]
Talking About Dominion, Reluctantly
Talking About Dominion, Reluctantly On the public pages and in the private salons of our culture, we casually discuss celebrity infidelity, weight loss diets, corporate malfeasance and the treasonous acts and petty peccadillos of elected officials. We’ve no reluctance to ponder the doping habits of baseball heroes or debate the degradation of the environment and … [read more]